The MP who broke a superinjunction naming a parent who was found to have coached her daughter to claim she was sexually abused by her father has remained defiant about naming her despite calls for his resignation.
“I am not ruling out breaking out any injunctions in the future”, John Hemming told the Huffington Post UK on Wednesday morning.
He said court secrecy meant Vicky Haigh had been prevented from being named as had the local authority prosecuting the case, Doncaster council.
“They proposed to jail Vicky Haigh in secret and the injunction preventing the local authority being named and preventing her being named. The judgment of the court doesn’t have any effect on that, it’s an irrelevant issue to the underlying issue.
"If we are going to take the step of locking somebody up in secret we should know who they are and what they have done. I knew everything that’s been reported some time ago, and I made the decision to name here nonetheless.”
But breaking the injunction in using parliamentary priviledge April led to newspapers giving sympathetic coverage of Haigh's case, with one columnist saying the then heavily pregnant Haigh was "fleeing the babysnatchers". A judge has now made it possible to reveal the full details of the case and Haigh's name.
Doncaster’s Labour MP John Mann has since written to the speaker to call on Hemming to resign for breaking the injunction.
Mann said the Haigh case “shows why a gung-ho attitude to the breaching of court injunctions on the floor of the House is both foolhardy and irresponsible", adding "he clearly has a psychological obsession with the breaking of court injunctions and is not fit to be an MP”.
But despite the critcism, Hemming said he would continue with his campaign against court secrecy.
“No. The usual suspects always criticise me. I am not deterred by criticism, at the end of the day if no one is criticising you you’re not doing anything."
In May, the Liberal Democrat MP became famous for breaking a superinjunction naming Ryan Giggs as the footballer who had slept with Imogen Thomas.